But, despite drawing a distinction between the GCC and periodic industrial crises, modern GCC
theorists still see intensified economic problems as a very important part of the general crisis
of capitalism. For example, the Soviet revisionist writer V. Trepelkov wrote that there are four
“major features” of the general crisis of capitalism:

1. “[T]he world is divided into two opposing socio-economic systems, the
socialist and capitalist ones…. [T]he change in the alignment of forces in favor of socialism
is the most significant manifestation of the increasingly deepening general crisis of
capitalism…. The contradiction between the two opposing social systems is the principal
contradiction of the modern era.”
2. “[T]he crisis of the colonial
system, a crisis which at a definite stage develops into its breakdown…. A large group of
countries that have won political independence are now fighting for their economic
independence. Some have opted for the non-capitalist road of development….”
3. “[T]he aggravation of the internal
economic contradictions of the imperialist countries, and the heightening of economic
instability and decay. This makes itself felt in sharp fluctuations in the growth rates,
in disproportionate economic development, in increasingly frequent crises, in constant
under-loading [perhaps this just means the gross underutilization of existing factories
—S.H.], in chronic unemployment, in runaway inflation, in the crisis of international
monetary relations, in militarization of the economy, etc.”
4. “[T]he crisis of bourgeois
politics and ideology.” [From V. Trepelkov, General Crisis of Capitalism (Moscow:
Progress Publishers, 1983), pp. 21-25.]

However, if we look at each of these four “features” we find serious problems for the GCC
thesis:

“With regard to point 1), the world was not really divided into a
socialist sphere and a capitalist sphere in 1983 when Trepelkov’s book was published, nor
is it today. The so-called ‘socialist camp’ at that time was really a competing
state-capitalist camp. And a mere 6 or 8 years later much of this so-called ‘socialist
camp’, including the Soviet Union itself, fell apart completely.
“Feature 2), with regard to the
crisis of the colonial system, also has some problems. It is true that old-style open
colonialism had a world-wide crisis which led to its nearly universal replacement with
neo-colonialism. But the completion of this great (but superficial) change actually led to
a lot of demoralization (because neo-colonialism is really little better), and probably
even to an overall reduction in anti-imperialist struggle around the world for a time. Of
course I don’t say that there cannot be struggle in the neo-colonies for ‘economic
independence’, but so far this struggle has been mostly under the leadership of national
bourgeois forces—which is why it has been so pathetically weak and ineffective. And as for
seeking economic independence by some ‘non-capitalist’, but also non-socialist, road—that
is certainly a dead-end pipe dream.
“Anti-imperialist struggle, at one
level or another, is a permanent feature of the imperialist era. And as such, it might
well be described as a permanent problem for imperialism. But none of this necessarily
means that imperialism is in a permanent ‘general crisis’.
“Let me skip feature 3) for a moment
and go on to feature 4), ‘the crisis of bourgeois politics and ideology’. Well, of course,
there have been many political crises over the past few decades, but bad as this has been
in the ‘West’, it has been worse in the Soviet sphere—which ended up collapsing completely.
This general crisis, which is supposed to be ‘a process in which more and more
countries depart from capitalism’ has turned out to be more of a general crisis of
revisionism, wherein more and more revisionist countries revert to Western-style
capitalism. And while there has indeed also been considerable ideological ferment in the
‘West’, actually Western ideologists have been riding relatively high in the saddle in
recent years. So much so, in fact, that some of them have proclaimed the ‘end of ideology’
and even the ‘end of history’! Unfortunately, the bigger ideological crisis has been
within the ranks of revolutionaries and Marxists, many of whom have been losing their
bearings. (It is bitter to recognize things like this, but it is the truth of the matter.)
“So really, if you want to defend the
GCC thesis today, it must all come down to ‘feature 3)’, the aggravation of economic
contradictions in the capitalist world. And here too there are great problems for the GCC
thesis. Here’s one big problem: If this serious aggravation of economic problems is not due
to the same contradictions which bring about ‘ordinary crises’, then what is it due to? That
should be a really embarrassing question for ‘modern’ GCC theorists, if they were ever to
consider it. Neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Soviet revisionist economists, nor anybody else
(as far as I know), has ever given an answer to this question. And in fact, Lenin said
exactly the opposite—that the contradictions of the imperialist era are the very same
contradictions as racked capitalism beforehand, but now greatly intensified. So
while the GCC theorists started out by denying that the GCC is the same as a capitalist
economic crisis, in the end that is pretty much all that is left of their doctrine after
the invalid and now-discredited political points are thrown out.
“It is true, of course, that we can
no longer look at capitalist crises in the same way we did in the 19th century.
We are forced by plain and obvious facts to recognize that there are both short term
fluctuations in the capitalist economy (still usually called ‘business cycles’) and
longer-term, broader ups and downs, such as the Great Depression, the post-World War II boom,
and the 35-year-long slowdown that began in the early 1970s. And, once again, the very fact
that there are also longer-term ups and downs is fatal for the GCC claim of permanent
general crisis.
“The old Comintern theory of the
‘general crisis of capitalism’ cannot be upheld in either its 1930s form, nor its ‘modern’
form. It is a failed, and even incoherent theory, once you start to look at it carefully.
Reality is much more complex than that simple theory comprehends.” —Extracts from Scott H.,
“Comments on Sison’s
‘Contradictions in the World Capitalist System and the Necessity of Socialist Revolution’”
(Jan. 23, 2002). See that essay for further criticism of the GCC thesis.

GENERAL WILL
An important concept in the social philosophy of Jean Jacques
Rousseau. In his definition the general will is the common good that any
well-formed (normal) citizen would recognize, and is neither that citizen’s own private
will nor quite the same as the shared private wills of all individual citizens. The concept
of the general will is therefore a rather sophisticated abstraction, in the same
way that the class interests of a given social class are a sophisticated abstraction from
the totality of all the individual interests of members of that class.

“There is often a great difference between the will of all [what
all individuals want] and the general will; the general will studies only the common
interest while the will of all studies private interest, and is indeed no more than
the sum of individual desires. But if we take away from these same wills, the pluses
and minuses which cancel each other out, the sum of the difference is the general
will.” —Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, translated by Maurice
Cranston, (NY: Penguin, 1983), Book II, Chapter 3, pp. 72-73. The words above in
brackets are in the original.
[Ignoring Rousseau’s incorrect
psychological focus, what is being said here is that the common interests of members
of a group must be abstracted from their individual interests, and are by no means
always identical to their shared individual interests. Quite a sophisticated
observation for 1762! —S.H.]

GLASS-STEAGALL ACT
A law passed by the U.S. Congress in 1933 which separated the more risky forms of banking
(“investment banking”) from ordinary commercial and savings banking. It was recognized in
the Great Depression that the combination of these
two forms of banking had aggravated the financial aspects of that great economic crisis,
and led to the failure of many more banks and the loss of savings deposits for millions of
people.
However, by the 1990s the ruling class had
forgotten this lesson. Their unscientific and totally erroneous economic theory convinced
them that great economic crises could no longer occur in the capitalist system. This,
combined with their enormous greed and desire to gamble with people’s savings, led to the
repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 at the hands of the Republican-controlled Congress
and a Democrat President (Bill Clinton) who remarked: “This [repeal] legislation is truly
historic. It is true the Glass-Steagall law is no longer appropriate to the economy in which
we live.” [“Clinton Signs Legislation Overhauling Banking Laws”, Dow Jones
News Service, Nov. 12, 1999.] A mere 8 years later the
“Great Recession” began (the early stages of a new
depression), and the renewed merger of ordinary banking and
investment banking once again greatly aggravated the financial aspects of the crisis. (It is
true however, that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act was mostly just a formality; the
banking industry had pretty much been ignoring it—with the tacit approval of the government—for
at least a decade.)

GLOBAL FINANCIAL ASSETS
The total financial assets owned by anyone or any company
or government organization over the entire world. In 2007 the global financial assets were
estimated to be $196 trillion by the McKinsey Global Institute (Mapping Global Capital
Markets: Fifth Annual Report, October 2008).

GOULD, Stephen Jay (1941-2002)
American liberal-radical paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, best known for his
long-running series of erudite and literary essays about evolution in Natural History
magazine.
Together with Niles Eldridge, Gould developed
the theory of punctuated equilibrium, which modifies
the traditional Darwinian conception of uniformly gradual evolution by pointing out that within
that overall gradualness there are occasional periods of relatively rapid evolutionary change in
which new species can arise after long periods of relative stasis. Punctuated equilibrium is one
example of the recognition of the importance of qualitative
leaps (or dialectical leaps) in science, which Marx established as a fundamental principle
of materialist dialectics. And, indeed, punctuated equilibrium was apparently suggested to Gould
by his radical upbringing. (His father was a Marxist.) When pro-gradualist critics lampooned the
theory of punctuated equilibrium as “evolution by jerks”, Gould shot back by referring to his
critics’ theory as “evolution by creeps”!
Gould was a powerful opponent of
sociobiology and its supposedly sanitized reincarnation,
“evolutionary psychology”, and criticized these
bourgeois perversions of biology for their “deterministic view of human society and human
action.” He pointed out that there was little actual evidence for genetic or other forms of
biological determinism, and that such views
merely represented the cultural or class biases of their supporters. Gould also pointed out that
adaptive behaviors are often passed on through human culture and not genetics. He of course
recognized that the genetic and biological foundation of human beings and our brains certainly
can and do affect our behavior, but appropriately insisted that our biological makeup allows
for a very broad range of actual behavior. This flexibility “permits us to be aggressive
or peaceful, dominant or submissive, spiteful or generous… Violence, sexism, and general
nastiness are biological since they represent one subset of a possible range of behaviors. But
peacefulness, equality, and kindness are just as biological—and we may see their influence
increase if we can create social structures that permit them to flourish.” Gould is also to be
praised for his opposition to racist and sexist notions presented in the supposed form of
“science”. See especially his important book Mismeasure of Man (1981).
Gould was an important advocate of evolutionary
science, and an effective and important critic of creationism
and other religious attacks on biology. However, his rejection of Marxism sometimes led him into
serious error when he wandered into other topics (as when he promoted the classless notion that
the Golden Rule should be viewed as the foundation of morality, rather
than the Marxist view that class interests form that foundation). And like many prominent
intellectuals in bourgeois society he feared appearing to be “too radical”, and thus failed to
critize religion in general even though he did strongly criticize religious attempts to
oppose or distort evolutionary biology specifically.
The worst example of this was in his theory of
“non-overlapping magisteria” in the book Rock of Ages (1999) which absurdly claimed that
there need be no true conflict between science and religion. According to Gould the “magisterium
[or sphere] of science” covers the “empirical realm”, while the “magisterium of religion” covers
questions of “ultimate meaning” and morality. He claims that these two “magisteria” do not
overlap and should not poach in each other’s legitimate domain. In reality morality too has an
objective basis in the collective group interests of people (or, in class society, in class
interests), and ethics therefore has its basis in science just as the theories in biology or
physics do. Furthermore, all religion is deeply opposed to at least some parts of science.
The nearly universal religious claim that there are one or more immaterial gods, for example, is
opposed to modern cognitive psychology which explicates mind as a set of functional aspects of
material matter (brains) and which therefore denies even the possibility of any such thing as a
“disembodied mind”.
While Gould played a very positive role in the
defense of evolutionary science, his bourgeois idealist conceptions in psychology led him into
major errors in other spheres. It is unfortunate that he was not a more consistent
materialist.

GRAMSCI, Antonio (1891-1937)
Italian Communist leader and theoretician. Raised on the impoverished island of Sardinia,
a scholarship allowed him to attend Turin University where he was a brilliant student, but
where he was also unfortunately strongly influenced by the liberal idealist philosopher,
Benedetto Croce. In 1913 he joined the Socialist Party. In 1919
he helped found the left-wing newspaper, L’Ordine Nuovo, and was active in promoting
workers’ councils (“Soviets”) in factories, which were
inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
He became more and more critical of the reformist ideas of the Socialist Party and helped
to form the Communist Party of Italy in 1921. Gramsci was the Italian representative at the
meeting of the Third International in Moscow in
1922, and worked for the Comintern in Moscow and Vienna in
1922-24. In 1924 he was elected to the Italian parliament and returned to Italy to became
the top leader of the CPI.
Mussolini was now in power, and he and his
Fascist regime banned the Communist Party in 1926. Gramsci himself was arrested and spent the
rest of his life in prison. Ironically, his great reputation today, especially in Left academia,
derives from his time in prison where he wrote 34 notebooks, containing over 2000 printed
pages. There are some difficulties in reading these notebooks both because they were just
Gramsci’s own notes, with multiple notebooks being worked on simultaneously, and not
something written for publication, and because of the prison authorities who prevented
him from writing in a way that might be used to “inflame the masses”. This forced Gramsci
to frequently write in an academic and obscure style, and to resort to
Aesopian language, as when he uses the phrase “modern
theory” where he simply means “Marxism”.
Gramsci’s focus in his notebooks on intellectuals and
their role in society, and on literature and culture, of course appeals to academics today,
and explains in part his continuing popularity there. His discussion of the capitalist
state is weak, certainly compared to Lenin’s firm class position
on the issue.
Since he was living in a prison in a Fascist
country, and the Communist Party was mostly suppressed, he did not think the sort of
revolutionary strategy employed by the Bolsheviks in Russia was fully appropriate there.
Instead of such a frontal assault (insurrection), he thought there was the necessity of a
long-term war of attrition, or a “war of position” (like the trench warfare of World War I),
to prepare the way for proletarian revolution. Gramsci’s much discussed notion of
hegemony seems to be related to this, the long-term struggle
between the ideological hegemony of the ruling class and a hoped for alternative ideological
hegemony of the working class forming around its revolutionary party. While in the advanced
capitalist countries there is in fact the necessity for laying the groundwork for an
eventual revolutionary uprising through patient work of organizing and education over
a long period, there is also the danger that in doing so that eventual goal of revolution
will become merely window dressing for reformism and revisionism. This perhaps shows why
academic revisionists are so attracted to Gramsci: they see this possibility not as a
danger at all, but rather more as a welcome perpetual postponement of revolution.

“Pessimism of the Intellect; Optimism of the Will” —A slogan, probably
authored by Gramsci himself, which appeared regularly on the masthead of L’Ordine
Nuovo, the newspaper he edited.

GREAT CAPITALIST MASS EXTINCTION
The currently intensifying great mass extinction of
animals and plants which is being caused primarily by the capitalist system and rule, which
values corporate profits far higher than it does the protection of nature and the environment
for the continued overall benefit of humanity.
Even most biologists imbued with bourgeois
ideology admit that we are already in a period of a great mass extinction of species, but tend
to blame this on “humanity” in general, or over-population, or governmental ignorance, etc.
In other words, even the liberals among them seldom recognize the systemic causes of this
extinction episode, let alone the central responsibility of the capitalist class for it. It is
true that excessive human population growth is secondarily to blame for this mass extinction.
But by far the most important factor is still that the ruling bourgeoisie just does not give
a damn, and while they are in control of world they refuse to take any serious steps to stop
this ever-expanding annihilation of plant and animal species. It is already clear that
this mass extinction will very likely be one of the greatest in the entire history of the
Earth, which includes some very large die-offs many millions of years ago. Indeed, it is not
entirely clear whether our own species, Homo sapiens, will survive the capitalist
era.

“Populations of plants, insects and birds in the U.K. have dropped
precipitously in the past 40 years—more evidence that the world is in the midst of its
sixth mass extinction. The previous one wiped out the dinosaurs.” —Science
magazine, March 19, 2004; quoted in Scientific American, May 2004, p. 40.

GREAT DEPRESSION OF THE 1930s
A severe and prolonged economic overproduction
crisis which broke out in all the capitalist countries and which lasted the entire decade
of the 1930s in most of them.
In the U.S. the Great Depression is usually
said to have begun with the stock market and financial Crash
in the fall of 1929. However, the U.S. economy was already entering what we would now call a
recession early in 1929, and the severe conditions we now associate with the Great Depression
developed over a several year period, and didn’t reach their worst point until 1933. There
was then a small upward trend for several years because of New Deal programs and de facto
Keynesian deficits (though they weren’t yet
called that). When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt eased off on the deficit financing,
the economy again worsened in 1937-1938. As Roosevelt partially learned his lesson, and
stepped up the government spending again, the Depression eased a bit after that, but didn’t
come to a final end until World War II. For the U.S., therefore, the Depression—from start to
finish—should be dated as lasting from 1929 through at least 1940, or about 12 years.
The Great Depression was partially
mitigated (or in a few countries such as Germany completely interrupted) by the
huge Keynesian deficit spending for public works and war preparations that occurred in most
advanced capitalist countries during the 1930s. It was completely interrupted in all
the imperialist countries during World War II itself, with the truly massive deficit spending
for the war. But it was only the massive destruction of capital during World War II
that truly ended the Great Depression and prevented it from resuming after the war.
[For more on this, see my essay “False Lessons from the Great Depression”, at
http://www.massline.org/PolitEcon/ScottH/False_Lessons.htm.]
See also sub-topics below.

“The great severity of the banking crises in the Great Depression is
well known to students of the period. The percentages of operating banks which failed
in each year from 1930 to 1933 inclusive were 5.6, 10.5, 7.8, and 12.9; because of
failures and mergers, the number of banks operating at the end of 1933 was only just
above half the number that existed in 1929. Banks that survived experienced heavy
losses.” —Ben Bernanke, Essays on the Great Depression (2000), p. 44.

There was a huge amount of debt built up in the U.S. economy during the boom years of
the 1920s, and because of both increased debt and falling incomes during the Depression the
ratio of debt servicing to national income went up from 9% in 1929 to 19.8% in 1932-33. In
a 1934 survey of home owners with mortgages in 22 different cities, the default rate ranged
from a low of 21% (in Richmond, VA) to a high of 62% (in Cleveland). In more than half of
the cities the default rate was above 38%. The percentages of those behind in their rent on
rented properties was even higher. The financial status of farmers was worse still, and by
the beginning of 1933 45% of all U.S. farms were delinquent in their mortgage payments.
State and local governments were also in serious debt trouble, with 37 cities with populations
greater than 30,000 people and 3 states defaulting on their debt by March 1934. [Bernanke,
op. cit., p. 46.]
The strong deflation
during the Depression served to amplify the debt burdens (because the debt had to be repaid
in currency that had become more valuable and harder to come by). But contrary to the opinions
of some bourgeois economists this deflation was not the primary cause of these intensifying
problems during the first 4 years of the Depression. Bernanke notes that “Although the
deflation of the 1930’s was unusually protracted, there had been a similar episode as recently
as 1921-22 which had not led to mass insolvency.” [Ibid., pp. 46-47.]
The situation with corporate profits during
this period of the unwinding of the economy into deep depression is interesting. The aggregate
corporate profits before taxes were negative in 1931 and 1932, and after-tax retained profits
were negative for all the years from 1930 to 1933. However, the biggest corporations (those
with more than $50 million in assets) maintained positive profits through this entire period!
[Bernanke, ibid.]
The index of industrial production, which stood
at 114 in July 1929 gradually fell to just 53 in July 1932, then picked up just slightly for a
few months before falling back to 54 in March 1933. Thus industrial production had fallen to
less than half its level before the Depression began. [Bernanke, op. cit., pp. 48-49.]
Similar events were occurring in all the other
major capitalist countries, though—interestingly—many of them (including Britain and France)
did not have major banking crises. Most bourgeois economists are quite puzzled by this fact,
since they falsely believe that financial crises were the “cause” of the depression in “the
real economy”.

“GREAT MODERATION, The”
A term sometimes used by American bourgeois economists to refer to the period of relatively
low inflation and fairly steady (if mostly unimpressive) economic growth in the United
States which lasted for a couple decades starting around the mid-1980s. In the 1970s and
early 1980s there was a period of stagflation (the
“Great Inflation” coupled with economic stagnation), and by
that deplorable standard the economic situation in the later 1980s and 1990s was much
improved. Of course “moderation” is considered a good thing by bourgeois economists when it
comes to inflation, but not so good when it comes to GDP growth; so the term “The Great
Moderation” seems to refer mostly to the more moderate levels of inflation during that
post-stagflation period.
What was the cause of “The Great Moderation”?
Why did things improve for a while? First, the government cut back on its very loose and
expansive monetary policy and restrained its Keynesian
budget deficits. Second, many American industries “restructured”, i.e., closed
unprofitable factories and cut their workforce. Not only were huge numbers of workers layed
off, but also many lower and middle-level managers were cut. All of these sorts of things
were included under the name of neoliberalism, and amounted
especially to a major new assault on the working class. In addition there was a much more
rapid increase in consumer debt, which help spur some renewed economic growth for a while.
“The Great Moderation” included one short
burst in economic growth associated with the “New Economy” bubble of the late 1990s. But
that bubble then burst and there was a recession in 2000-2001. After a very slow and shallow
recovery, stoked especially by the rapidly growing housing and financialization bubble, a
new recession started at the end of 2007, and became a major financial crisis in the fall
of 2008. This marked the complete and final end of anything that could reasonably be called
“The Great Moderation”! True, for now inflation is still quite low, but the American and
world capitalist economies as a whole are limping along in a very wounded fashion. This
will remain the case for the coming immediate period, and will eventually collapse into a
much more serious new depression. Moreover, along the way (and because of the continuing
massive Keynesian deficit financing), there will be a major return of inflation which will
far exceed the levels of the 1970s and 1980s.

“The most important plot and scheme of the very small number of
persons who stubbornly persist in the bourgeois reactionary line is to incite the
masses to struggle against each other. They have secretly organized and manipulated
some people and mass organizations, whom they have hoodwinked, to suppress the
revolution, protect themselves, and to provoke conflicts in which coercion or force
are used in a vain attempt to create confusion. They spread rumors, turned black
into white and shifted the blame for the evil they had done behind people’s backs
on to the proletarian revolutionaries, labelling the latter with the ‘bourgeois
reactionary line.’”
—“Carry the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution Through to the End”, an editorial summing
up the GPCR in 1966 and laying out its goals for 1967, Peking Review, vol. 10,
#1, Jan. 1, 1967, p. 10.

“Innovation has brought about a multitude of new products, such as
subprime loans and niche credit programs for immigrants. Such developments are
representative of the market responses that have driven the financial services
industry throughout the history of our country … With these advances in technology,
lenders have taken advantage of credit-scoring models and other techniques for
efficiently extending credit to a broader spectrum of consumers. … Where once
more-marginal applicants would simply have been denied credit, lenders are now able
to quite efficiently judge the risk posed by individual applicants and to price that
risk appropriately. These improvements have led to rapid growth in subprime mortgage
lending; indeed, today subprime mortgages account for roughly 10 percent of the
number of all mortgages outstanding, up from just 1 or 2 percent in the early 1990s.”
—Alan Greenspan, “Consumer Finance”, April 8, 2005. Federal Reserve System’s Fourth
Annual Community Affairs Research Conference. Federal Reserve Board.

This wondrous new subprime mortgage industry began to collapse in March 2007, and led
to the more general financial crisis of the fall of 2008. Thus Greenspan is appropriately
criticized for his role in the collapse of the housing bubble and for “engineering” that
housing bubble to begin with. However, it is true that if Greenspan had not engineered
that new bubble, the economy would simply have begun collapsing a few years sooner than
it did. Under capitalism it is only bubbles that keep the
economy going! Thus the basic fault here lies not with individuals like Greenspan, but
with the capitalist system of production itself.
Nevertheless, it is true that Greenspan
promoted all sorts of highly risky financial behavior that was bound to come crashing
down eventually. He never met a new type of derivative that
he didn’t like. He didn’t really believe in any form of regulation, and when potential
problems were pointed out he often recommended “self-regulation” (i.e., no regulation of
Wall Street at all). But the financial crisis in the fall of 2008 did shake him a bit.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Greenspan said: “I have found
a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed
by that fact.” Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) then pressed him to clarify his words. “In other
words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not
working,” Waxman said. “Absolutely, precisely,” Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s
precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with
very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.” [From the Wikipedia
article on Greenspan, as of 8/28/09. Greenspan went on to admit his error in opposing
the regulation of derivatives and also admitted that financial institutions were not
protecting investors as well as he expected. But what he refused to budge on was his
general faith in the “free market” and the capitalist system in general, which are
the real sources of all these financial and economic problems. Bourgeois economists
are simply unable to learn the most essential lessons!]

As for Mr [Paul] Samuelson’s friend of 50 years, Alan Greenspan, once
chairman of the Federal Reserve, “the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander”—a
devotee of laissez-faire capitalism. “You can take the boy out of the cult but you
can’t take the cult out of the boy,” Mr Samuelson told the Atlantic [magazine]
this summer. “He actually had [an] instruction, probably pinned on the wall: ‘Nothing
from this office should go forth which discredits the capitalist system. Greed is
good.’” [From The Economist, Dec. 19, 2009, p. 130.]

GREYHOUNDS
An elite paramilitary commando force in Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and other states in eastern
India, which was created in 1989 in order to suppress the Naxalites
(Maoist revolutionaries). Over the past 5 years, through their ruthlessness and attacks on
the population, they have caused a temporary setback to the revolution in the one state
of Andhra Pradesh. The greyhounds are one of the highest paid police forces in all of India,
even better paid than the elite National Security Guard. Much of their success in A.P. in
the 2004-2009 period, however, has been due to a combination of violence toward the people
and secret paid informants at the village level. The Greyhound force numbers around 2,500,
and usually moves in small bands of 15-25 commandos. They are specially trained for deep
forest pursuit and combat. However, they can also be defeated by the revolutionary forces.
In July 2008, 35 elite Greyhound commandos on a motor launch were attacked and killed by
revolutionaries in Orissa state, which was a huge setback to their operations.

“Guesdists—followers of Jules Guesde
and Paul Lafargue. They constituted a Left Marxist trend that stood for the independent
revolutionary politics of the French proletariat. They retained the name of Workers’
Party of France and remained true to the Havre Party Programme adopted in 1880, the
theoretical part of which was written by Marx. They had considerable influence in French
industrial centers and united the progressive elements of the French working class. In
1901 the Guesdists founded the Socialist Party of France.” —Footnote 46, Lenin: SW I (1967).

GUEVARA, Ernesto “Che” (1928-67)
Famous Argentinian Marxist revolutionary who played an important role in the Cuban
Revolution, and through a firm internationalist perspective attempted to help promote
revolutions throughout the world. While in many respects a great and appropriately honored
revolutionary, some of his political views and theories were seriously wrong, and even led to
disaster both for others and himself. (See: FOCO
THEORY.)
In 1951 Che took a year off from his
medical studies and travelled around South America on a motorcycle. He later wrote up
his experiences in his Motorcycle Diaries, eventually made into a well-known and
excellent film. Che was transformed by the horrible poverty and conditions of the people
that he saw on this trip, and soon came to understand that the great inequalities of
wealth in Latin America were due to the domination of capitalism, neocolonialism and
imperialism. He graduated with a medical degree from the University of Buenos Aires in
1953.
Che participated in the social reform
program of the government of Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala, and the 1954 CIA-organized
overthrow of that democratically elected government further radicalized him.
Che met Fidel Castro in Mexico and joined
his 26th of July Movement. He was with Castro in December 1956 when they “invaded” Cuba and
then set up guerrilla operations in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Che played an important
leading role in the two years of low-level guerrilla warfare in Cuba. This guerrilla
warfare was one of the factors that led to the collapse of the Batista dictatorship around
January 1, 1959.
Che also played an important role in the
first years of the Cuban revolutionary government. He served at various times as Minister
of Industry, president of the national bank, and a high-level Cuban diplomat. He played
an important role in agreeing to bring Soviet nuclear-armed missiles to Cuba, about which
President John F. Kennedy and U.S. imperialism came very close to starting a nuclear world
war.
While Castro tended to lean toward Soviet
revisionist ideology (as well as toward the Soviet Union for economic support and military
protection), Che was more ambivalent and on a few questions took a position closer to
that of Maoism. Che always firmly upheld the need for revolutionary armed struggle, though
it seems he did not fully appreciate the importance of the peasantry in Third World
countries. However, for him moral incentives under socialism were much more important than
material incentives. He argued that it was necessary to work toward forging a new political
consciousness, or toward creating a “new man”, as a means of promoting socialist production,
whereas revisionists typically argue that production must be hugely expanded first before
any progress toward creating a “new man” can be achieved (or even be seriously attempted).
Perhaps partly because of the intensifying
Sino-Soviet split and Castro’s siding with the revisionists, Che gradually became more
and more disatisfied with his role in the Cuban government. Finally, in 1965 he resigned
from all roles in that government and first headed off to the Congo (Kinshasa) in Africa
to participate in revolutionary guerrilla warfare there. After that failed, he headed to
South America, and made another attempt at his foco
strategy in Bolivia. This failed even more disastrously. In 1967 Che was captured by
the Bolivian Army (with the help of the CIA), and was then secretly tortured and
executed. It was the sad end to the life of a sincere and dedicated revolutionary.
But even in death, Che Guevara still
serves the world revolution as an honored and respected martyr. He is perhaps as famous
and influential today as he has been at any time since the late 1960s.
See also the important 1985 essay,
“Guevara, Debray, and Armed Revisionism”, by Lenny Wolff, at
http://www.bannedthought.net/Cuba-Che/Guevara/Guevara-Debray-Wolff.pdf for a
strongly critical appraisal of Che, Régis Debray, and focoism.